She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I’m jus’ pain covered with skin.
Oh! Alice in Wonderland. You’re too big for that.
He used it to haul squids and he liked a fresh breeze to blow in his face. His name was Francis Almones and he had a sad life, for he always made just a fraction less than he needed to live.
I seen her beat the hell out of a tin peddler with a live chicken one time ‘cause he give her a argument. She had the chicken in one han’, an’ the ax in the other, about to cut its head off. She aimed to go for that peddler with the ax, but she forgot which hand was which, an’ she takes after him with the chicken. Couldn’ even eat that chicken when she got done. They wasn’t nothing but a pair a legs in her han’. Grampa throwed his hip outa joint laughin’. How’d my folks go so easy?
And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City.
External reality has a way of being not so external after all.
Come back with your shield or on it.
I hope you know what you’re doing when you issue me a license to talk. I’ve heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second.
How much is whiskey a gallon?” “I don’t know,” said Hughie. “I never get more than a half pint at a time myself – at one time that is. I figure you get a quart and right away you got friends. But you get a half pint and you can drink it in the lot before – well before you got a lot of folks around.
In the summer when the hands of a clock point to seven, it is a nice time to get up, but in winter the same time is of no value whatever. How much better is the sun!
The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly. There’s a quality of fire in these colors. I got high in the mountains before dusk.
You love beer so much. I’ll bet some day you’ll go in and order a beer milk shake.
Yes, I can understand that. It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don’t know and don’t hate.” “Maybe that makes it easier,” said Louis. “You have a point, Louis. But some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.
Those people might have been murderers, sadists, brutes, ugly apish subhumans for all I knew, but I found myself thinking, “What charming people, what flair, how beautiful they are. How I wish I knew them.” And all based on the delicious smell of soup.
Let any gay and hopeful thing happen to a man, and some chicken goes howling to the block.
It must be that there are years unlike other years, as different in climate and direction and mood as one day can be from another day. This year of 1960 was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. It wasn’t only in me or in New Baytown. Presidential nominations would be coming up soon and in the air the discontent was changing to anger and with the excitement anger brings.
I don’t know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
Without travel, writing dies.
It’s hard to give people things – I guess it’s harder to be given things, though.
Her face looked for the answer that is always concealed in language.